More Matters on Meta

I know, I know. These posts have no pictures. How boring is that? Boring or not, still the meta is something we must continue to talk about. Yes, there’s more. I wrapped up the last article by making a little bit of a strange reference to literature and other works of art to describe the meta in gaming. Does it still hold? Let’s bash some more on Kaleos and see.

A perfect example of this would be an alternate general (Reva Eventide) ending up seeing significantly more play on the ladder than Kaleos Xaan – Songhai’s main general.

Why am I talking about meta? It’s more important to the game than to just bash on Songhai’s main general Kaleos – it’s actually something we need to understand in order to play even semi-competitively against others.
Is this still looking about as clear as mud?

Let’s say, for example all of a sudden every single deck you saw had 100% rush minions.

How would you deal with this? How would you counteract it? What would you do automatically different than usual the minute you start a game?

The “Everyone has rush on every single card” is the meta and “I’m going to run 3x Nightwatcher and a buttload of provoke minions” is your counter-strategy to the meta.

hey, a picture!

Making sense now? Good. A term you’re going to hear a lot is viability in the meta. What this means is as new things are discovered, uncovered, or developed, new counter strategies are also discovered, uncovered, and developed while old ones may go to the wayside.

The meta is an important indicator of the health of a certain strategy, but that doesn’t mean that it is the end all be all of everything.

In closing, yes- we can try to define intrinsic values for cards but sometimes we will add cards to our arsenal that don’t “work out so well” with our formulas we’ve developed thus far – but are an addition to the deck to deal with a situation that has become popular with the players.

These cards are called tech cards and they are designed to specifically hard-counter things in the meta that may be causing lots of difficulty for us in our deck.
next we’ll talk about mechaz0r and more specifically, how to counter that with a otherwise “useless” tech card.

Summary:

The meta can change and grow, causing players to find out what works and what doesn’t work

Tech cards, or “anti-meta” cards may not be viable with our algorithms and formulas we have come up with but can still be a necessity depending on the current state of the meta-game.